Corriere della Sera

Corriere della Sera: Italy's Major Daily Faces Censorship in China and North Korea

What Corriere della Sera is

Corriere della Sera is Italy's largest newspaper by circulation, founded in 1876 and based in Milan. It is owned by RCS MediaGroup, a major Italian publishing conglomerate. The publication has maintained its position as a flagship Italian daily for nearly 150 years, with both print and digital editions reaching millions of readers across Italy and internationally. Its website, corriere.it, publishes Italian-language news on politics, economics, culture, and international affairs.

Why it's censored

Corriere della Sera faces active censorship in two distinct political contexts, each with different regulatory mechanisms.

In China, the blocking is enforced under the Great Firewall—a system administered by the Chinese government's internet regulation apparatus, including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Italian news outlets, including Corriere della Sera, are systematically restricted because they publish content deemed critical of Chinese government policies, human rights practices, and political developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The censorship is not formally codified in published law but enforced through technical infrastructure and informal directives to internet service providers. China's approach targets foreign news sources broadly; Corriere della Sera's Italian-language coverage of Chinese affairs and its occasional critical reporting on labor conditions and governance issues trigger blanket blocking.

In North Korea, censorship is absolute and indiscriminate. Nearly all foreign news websites, including Corriere della Sera, are blocked by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and the state's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. North Korea maintains one of the world's most restrictive information environments, with the vast majority of the population having no internet access. The few individuals with authorized access—primarily government officials, military personnel, and scientists—operate within a closed intranet. Foreign news sources are blocked not because of specific content but as a blanket policy to prevent any uncontrolled information flow from abroad.

Technical blocking methods

In China, Corriere della Sera is blocked using multiple overlapping techniques. DNS filtering is a primary mechanism—requests to corriere.it are intercepted and return no valid IP address or false results. Complementary IP-level blocking targets known server addresses hosting the site. Deep packet inspection (DPI) is also deployed to identify HTTPS traffic to the domain and terminate connections. SNI (Server Name Indication) filtering may be used to block TLS handshakes based on the requested domain name, preventing even encrypted access attempts.

In North Korea, blocking is simpler: the state maintains a whitelist of approved domains rather than a blacklist. Corriere della Sera, along with virtually all foreign news outlets, is not on that list, making it unreachable through any state-sanctioned internet pathway.

User workarounds

Users in China attempting to access Corriere della Sera typically employ encrypted tunneling protocols to mask their traffic. Circumvention tools that route connections through servers outside mainland China, encrypting the traffic to prevent DPI inspection, are widely used. DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS can bypass local DNS blocking, though the Great Firewall's sophistication means IP and SNI filtering still present barriers.

In North Korea, practical workarounds are negligible for civilian populations. A small number of individuals with access to alternative networks (rare) might theoretically employ similar circumvention, but the risk profile is prohibitively high.

Alternatives

Readers seeking international news from European sources face similar censorship in both countries. The BBC, Deutsche Welle, and France 24 are all blocked in China under the same framework. The Guardian and Financial Times face comparable restrictions. In North Korea, no mainstream foreign news outlet is accessible.

Outlook

Censorship of Corriere della Sera in China is likely to remain stable or intensify. Beijing has increased technical blocking sophistication over the past five years and shows no sign of relaxing controls on foreign news. North Korea's restrictions are entrenched and unlikely to change absent major political upheaval. Neither country signals any movement toward easing digital restrictions on international press.